Senior lecturer in British literature
University of Caen
Research expertise
Poetry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; John Keats and British romanticism; British novel; letter-writing
Contributions
People
John Keats
When the second-generation Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821) – best known today for his ‘Great Odes’ and for coining the term ‘Negative Capability’ – died in Rome, at the age of 25, he may have been penniless, but he was certainly not friendless. Although his work received little public recognition during his lifetime, his close circle of friends in England strove to defend his genius and preserve his memory for posterity. Friendship was always central to Keats’s life; his poetry and letters attest to a vitally social existence, and to the lasting influence of London literary coteries on his development as a poet and thinker.